khuna is simply a yocro who was only good during cata where reckful has been a solid player for as long as i can remember, now that cata is over khuna will simply disappear into the abyss along with all the other million yocros this game bread

All these names being thrown out (Reckful, Khuna, Neilyo, Kalimist, etc.) are all fucking amazing and the best to ever play rogue. Of course everyone is going to have their own personal opinions and biases (ie: they dont like one of them personally, they have played with one and not another, etc.), but these retarded comments saying "Reckful is shit" or "Khuna is terrible" are idiotic and the people saying them should be banned from AJ. None of the aformentioned players are even close to being bad (and never were), and if you are one of the people saying it you are just a butthurt little girl who cant handle the fact that you will never be as good as them...

Good write Helia. I don't agree to all your points but this is a well thought-out post. Thanks for the feedback.

I think a mixture between solid content and personal opinion is good way to go. If you look at World of Ming - the whole concept of the site was to create drama and it build a community. From a personal taste I don't like trolling, but provoking rerollers or people that quit because a class is bad for three weeks is something I would not consider trolling. It's a statement, a provocative one fore sure, but I think provocation is something that fits Khunas profile well. He is not the nice guy next door and trying to paint him like that would fail.

As you can see it stired a discussion about top rogues and let's be honest - rogue rivalry is one of the best topics in WoW arena, it's like discussing Real vs. Barca in soccer. And try to walk in some bars with soccer fans and root for the wrong team... Emotions are part of the game, rivalries are part of the game. The limit I would not cross is lying or directly insulting someone.

The point is - the scene needs both. It needs the drama, the wild and sometimes unfriendly discussion as well as the solid content. Without the first part arena would be stale. Trashtalking is a huge part of most competitive scenes. You can even look at chess, for example Bobby Fischer vs. Kasparow is probably the most well-known chess series ever played and it had a lot of drama and trashtalking.

I think you might be missing something important. The scene needs both but there is a key component in both Ming and other successful games that I'm not sure is being accounted for.

1. TL and Reddit for SC2- the perfect example. TL brings a centralized hub for events and formal thoughts about upcoming elite level events (read: korean) by staff writers. The forums are heavily moderated and such things. Reddit brings other news, discussion, esports news, memes, images, youtube links, stream links (for the unpopular/uncommon streamers) and almost no moderating (outside of down votes etc).

2. AJ + WoM circa WoM existing- People went to WoM for drama and the occasional 1/1000 useful posts and AJ was (relatively more) serious. AJ doesn't equate to TL by any means, but there was still a division in expectations (ofc threads like the MS Paint Rage thread which mostly was there for laughs and silent class battles).

Both examples obviously use two different exclusive hubs and I think that is important to note, Hilde. I first read your post and thought it was actually funny how it could be so blatantly biased, but I realized that AJ =/= Old AJ =/= TL. I think this is also demonstrated in all the "what happened to this site posts,"- clearly AJ must not be what it used to be. Additionally, it doesn't really seem like AJ has formally said what its direction is. Things are slow moving and the site doesn't progress to fast or with much direction (probably attributed to the state of the scene and the dev's shitty way of developing pvp).

As a last thought, although your journalistic points are valid, I'm not convinced that AJ can really do a mix of both drama and serious content. The points made before are valid- a front page post with shots being fired etc while also providing content traffic for a well known player. Yes, it brings traffic. And yes it is confusing for the many people who have been here forever, who have been used to this site as being a forum for game discussion and thoughts, not random fanboying by staff members. The journalistic viewpoint/arguments you gave are true- drama brings traffic etc, but I'm not sure if AJ wants to try and be the only central hub for pvp, as well as the hub for all of its drama. If it does, I think it should be made more clear that a transition in direction of the site was/has been made, as I don't ever recall AJ being as bad as it is currently (little game discussion with large increases of traffic for s11 drama threads).

tl;dr: Not sure if one website being the drama + news/game discussion is what AJ wants (is? is going for? w/e fuck.)

I think you might be missing something important. The scene needs both but there is a key component in both Ming and other successful games that I'm not sure is being accounted for.

1. TL and Reddit for SC2- the perfect example. TL brings a centralized hub for events and formal thoughts about upcoming elite level events (read: korean) by staff writers. The forums are heavily moderated and such things. Reddit brings other news, discussion, esports news, memes, images, youtube links, stream links (for the unpopular/uncommon streamers) and almost no moderating (outside of down votes etc).

2. AJ + WoM circa WoM existing- People went to WoM for drama and the occasional 1/1000 useful posts and AJ was (relatively more) serious. AJ doesn't equate to TL by any means, but there was still a division in expectations (ofc threads like the MS Paint Rage thread which mostly was there for laughs and silent class battles).

Both examples obviously use two different exclusive hubs and I think that is important to note, Hilde. I first read your post and thought it was actually funny how it could be so blatantly biased, but I realized that AJ =/= Old AJ =/= TL. I think this is also demonstrated in all the "what happened to this site posts,"- clearly AJ must not be what it used to be. Additionally, it doesn't really seem like AJ has formally said what its direction is. Things are slow moving and the site doesn't progress to fast or with much direction (probably attributed to the state of the scene and the dev's shitty way of developing pvp).

As a last thought, although your journalistic points are valid, I'm not convinced that AJ can really do a mix of both drama and serious content. The points made before are valid- a front page post with shots being fired etc while also providing content traffic for a well known player. Yes, it brings traffic. And yes it is confusing for the many people who have been here forever, who have been used to this site as being a forum for game discussion and thoughts, not random fanboying by staff members. The journalistic viewpoint/arguments you gave are true- drama brings traffic etc, but I'm not sure if AJ wants to try and be the only central hub for pvp, as well as the hub for all of its drama. If it does, I think it should be made more clear that a transition in direction of the site was/has been made, as I don't ever recall AJ being as bad as it is currently (little game discussion with large increases of traffic for s11 drama threads).

tl;dr: Not sure if one website being the drama + news/game discussion is what AJ wants (is? is going for? w/e fuck.)

Good post. Like it. The point was to combine something provoking with solid content. The video is pretty decent and the rest simply worked. I understand the points very well and I like them. But I think there is a huge difference for what people are flamed and I think attacking whining is a valid choice.

Now regarding the community. I actually talked about that with Hotted in the unreleased interview. There are a lot of content creators that avoid AJ for the fact that they are flamed here. The scene is build on bragging rights and denying bragging rights of others in the mid-tier of players that never really got to the top. In SC2 there is one simple fact: If you lose, you are worse. In WoW it's Blizzard, the team-mates, lag, the overpowered enemy comp etc. Players rarely take responsibility (something that separates good from top players in my opinion). In addition to that the mid-tier of the scene is full of pay-to-win-boosted chars. This corruption in which basically every top player takes part takes away true competition and it's very hard for new players to get to the top. If you look around there are basically no top-end players that started with Cataclysm.

Calling people out on these things causes drama. It causes flames. But I think it is absolutely important to call out whining, to attack boosters for their shitty corruption, to name wintraders, DDOSers and all the other shit that is used to destroy competition. In my opinion only tournaments can bring back the scene. Why I posted this is video is a simple message: Stop whining and try to win despite the odds. Winning as underdog is the simple most exciting thing in any competitive game or sport. Disc priests and rogues are the underdogs right now and Khuna showed to some degree that winning is still possible.

You can flame me, tell AJ to kick me, hate on me, but you won't change my drive to make the WoW PvP community better, more competitive and closer to the SC2 community than it currently is. Right now we are working on tournaments. You can see the first result with Vadrak's tournament UI on Friday during the King of the Hill tournament. I don't know what could be more constructive than organizing a tournament team, creating the UI, looking for sponsors, writing guides and promoting this here and on other places in the web.

If it helps, I actually like the way AJ is going. Since Blizzard doesn't really seem to put the effort we all want into the game, I think its better that AJ do what it can to bring traffic. I would like to see more strict moderation though :/